"Clockwork" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... then, Panteley Eremyitch is such a wonderful man! He has only to wish for anything—he has only to take an idea into his head—and before you can look round, it's done; everything, you may say, goes like clockwork. Panteley ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... greatest of all offenses, the annihilation of individual liberty. Thus Ouida is right when she maintains that "the State only aims at instilling those qualities in its public by which its demands are obeyed, and its exchequer is filled. Its highest attainment is the reduction of mankind to clockwork. In its atmosphere all those finer and more delicate liberties, which require treatment and spacious expansion, inevitably dry up and perish. The State requires a taxpaying machine in which there is no hitch, an exchequer in which there is never a deficit, and a public, monotonous, obedient, ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... green paper work, because it's got arsenic in it, and it makes your head ache, and you're liable to blood poisonin'. One the girls fainted and had spasms, and as soon as he found it out he took her right off; and he's just like clockwork to pay. I think it'll do everything for S'tira to be along 'th me there, where ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... she had fallen under the last of McTeague's blows, her body twitching with an occasional hiccough that stirred the pool of blood in which she lay face downward. Towards morning she died with a rapid series of hiccoughs that sounded like a piece of clockwork ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... detail reorganizations. The shipping department, first; the correspondence division next; the accounting department third, and he literally swept through the office like the proverbial new broom, caught up all the loose ends, and established a routine like clockwork. So successful was his work that the directors hastened to add supervision of sales ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... moveth not that wise and ancient cow, Who chews her juicy cud so languid now Beneath her favorite elm, whose drooping bough Lulls all but inward vision, fast asleep: But still, her tireless tail a pendulum sweep Mysterious clockwork guides, and some hid pulley Her drowsy ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... two Leggos, and th' old seal would lie there sleepin', innocent as a child, and let them come close under the rock, and even climb it. But soon as ever they made a pounce—c'lk!—he rolled off the slope and into deep water. Regular as clockwork it happened; quiet and easy as a door on a greased hinge; and every time it made the three look foolisher ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... shining quickness of a robin's. But there was nothing soft or gracious or feathery about him. The skin of his wrinkled brown face had a dry and scaly look; his hands were the hands of a crocodile. His movements were marked by the lizard's disconcertingly abrupt clockwork speed; his speech was thin, fluty, and dry. Henry Wimbush's school-fellow and exact contemporary, Mr. Scogan looked far older and, at the same time, far more youthfully alive than did that gentle aristocrat with the face like ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... boats, propelled so vigorously by the muscular, excited men, whose great oars rose and fell with all the precision of clockwork, as they saw they were sure of ...
— Three Boys in the Wild North Land • Egerton Ryerson Young
... rat (the rat was blue) but before she well knew what she was about, found herself deep in the intricacies of a narration, having reference (if I am not altogether mistaken) to a pink horse (with green wings) that went, in a violent manner, by clockwork, and was wound up with an indigo key. With this history the king was even more profoundly interested than with the other—and, as the day broke before its conclusion (notwithstanding all the queen's ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... clockwork, all is order. They make no mistakes. Every third man wears a uniform, and whether he be a marshal of the empire or a brakeman, he is ready and perfectly willing to answer all your questions with tireless politeness, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... sure that everything is in order. At ten minutes to twelve, I hoist into place the two arms to which our wires are secured, stretching them tight by means of the winch which we have provided, and then I at once start the clockwork. I then descend, make my way to the tram-station, and take a third-class ticket to Colmar, where I will await you at Valentin's cabaret. If you do not arrive by sundown, I am to go on to ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... when I made all these antitheses!' he says in 1865. 'I learnt it of my daddy' is the comment of 1880. 'Was any other human being,' he asks in 1880, 'ever constructed with such a clumsy, elaborate set of principles, setting his feelings going as if they were clockwork?' This is the comment upon a passage where he has twisted his thoughts into a cumbrous and perfectly needless syllogism. He makes a similar comment on another passage in 1865, but 'I think,' he says in 1880, 'that I was a heavy ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... present hall you will see (if permitted) a fine store of plate, four pieces of which escaped the Great Fire, including a curious waggon and tun, the gift of W. Baude in 1573, which moves along the table by clockwork. The entrance colonnade, which occupies the site of the ancient cloister, with its Doric columns, is attractive, and a fine stone staircase protected by a wooden portcullis leads to the hall and court rooms. The hall itself is a noble chamber, panelled by Rowland Wynne after the Great ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... the directions and commands, issued like clockwork amid the confusion of battle. Our executive officer seemed to be in a ...
— The Monitor and the Merrimac - Both sides of the story • J. L. Worden et al.
... seemed to want no company; no conversation. I believe she was happy in her way: this routine sufficed for her; and nothing annoyed her so much as the occurrence of any incident which forced her to vary its clockwork regularity. ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... Cheapside. The automatic movements of these last-named figures would have struck the originators of the Varallo chapels with envy. They aimed at realism so closely that they would assuredly have had recourse to clockwork in some one or two of their chapels; I cannot doubt, for example, that they would have eagerly welcomed the idea of making the cock crow to Peter by a cuckoo-clock arrangement, if it had been presented to them. This opens up the whole question of realism versus conventionalism in art—a subject ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... "They frightened me horribly. I wanted to be revenged for that. But after a bit I was sure they were only clockwork. I wanted to stop them. I did stop the ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... and spurred, with riding-whip tucked under his arm, came up the pebbled pathway, drawing on his gauntleted gloves. Dicky trotted beside him. Manasseh followed in attendance. Behind them in the porchway the landlady bobbed unregarded, like a piece of clockwork ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... night, a signal was given and everything followed like clockwork. One of the prisoners short-circuited the wires, shutting off the electric lighting system and the current in the wire fences. There was no moon, and the camp was left ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... silence was broken by a shrill sound like the creaking of a rusty spring. It startled Don Juan; he all but dropped the phial. A sweat, colder than the blade of a dagger, issued through every pore. It was only a piece of clockwork, a wooden cock that sprang out and crowed three times, an ingenious contrivance by which the learned of that epoch were wont to be awakened at the appointed hour to begin the labors of the day. Through the ...
— The Elixir of Life • Honore de Balzac
... south, nor up nor down, nor measure nor relation, nor aught whatever, save an uneasy consciousness of a dream about bottomlessness. Of grief or pain, I think, I felt nothing; though I have a sort of memory now that some sound, resembling a sob or groan, though it was neither, came at regular clockwork intervals from my bosom during three or four days. Meantime, my brain registered like a tape-machine details the most frivolous, the most ludicrous—the name of a street, Strond Street, Snargate Street; ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... had a branding chute on the ranch for grown cattle, and the following morning the herd was corralled and the road-branding commenced. The cattle were uniform in size, and the stamping of the figure '4' over the holding "Lazy L" of Las Palomas, moved like clockwork. With a daybreak start and an abundance of help the last animal was ironed up before sundown. As a favor to Nancrede's outfit, their camp being nearly five miles distant, we held them the ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... a distinctly practical nature, which could be advanced by mathematical knowledge, had an interest for him: and his incessant industry enabled him to find time for many of them. Amongst such subjects were Tides and Tidal Observations, Clockwork, and the Strains in Beams and Bridges. A certain portion of his time was also given to Lectures, generally on current astronomical questions, for he held it as his duty to popularize the science as far as lay in his power. And he attended the meetings of the Royal ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... scenery, &c., should have a proper place where it should be left when not in use. Nails, pins, hammers, and other articles which come in constant use, should be kept in a large box near the stage. By working systematically, every thing will move on with clockwork nicety, and all confusion be avoided. Colored fires should be burnt in the ante-rooms at the sides of the stage; smoke and clouds should be produced at the back, or in the centre of the stage. The preparation ...
— Home Pastimes; or Tableaux Vivants • James H. Head
... she breakfasts. Well and good. After that she takes an hour or so to dress; that carries her on till two; then she goes for a walk in the Tuileries in the sight of all men, and she is always in by four to be ready for you. She lives like clockwork. She keeps no secrets from her maid, and Reine keeps nothing from me, you may be sure. Reine can't if she would—along of my son, for she is very sweet upon him. So, you see, if madame had any intimacy with Monsieur Crevel, we should be bound ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... had blurted out to him about the hypnotic eyes of this here Nature lover. He was quiet enough, but vicious, acting like he'd love to do some dental work on the poet that might or might not be painless for all he cared a hoot. He was taking his own drinks all alone, like clockwork—moody ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... commonplaces with charm. But men with that great gift are not to be met with in every railway-carriage, or at every dinner. The man we actually meet is one whose joke, though we have signalled it a mile off, we are powerless to stop, whose opinions come out with a whirr as of clockwork. Besides, it always happens in life that the man—or woman—with whom we would like to talk is at the next table. Those who really have something to say to each other so seldom have a chance ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... time, keeping our eyes glued on the movement of the hands in conjunction with the fire, and then the matter was phoned to headquarters. A result of their combination guns and clockwork was the destruction of one of our pieces and two of the French battery. Another battery observer had noticed the clockwork at the same time that we were watching it, and the gendarmes were notified; ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... shillings. All at once he heard a gentle whirring somewhere amongst them. It made him start and look behind him. There were the sails of a windmill going round and round almost close to his ear. He thought at first it must be one of those toys which are wound up and go with clockwork; but no, it was a common penny toy, with the windmill at the end of a whistle, and when the whistle blows the windmill goes. But the wonder was that there was no one at the whistle end blowing, and yet the sails were turning ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald
... giving to a telescope equatoreally mounted an automatic movement by connecting it with clockwork, was proposed in 1674 by Robert Hooke. Bradley in 1721 actually observed Mars with a telescope "moved by a machine that made it keep pace with the stars;"[337] and Von Zach relates[338] that he had once ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... and a plate of cake and bread-and-butter. I was prizing off the strips that held the sash, very carefully, and my heart suddenly commenced to gallop, without any reference to me. I'd never felt like that before, except once or twice. It was just as if I'd swallowed some clockwork arrangement, unconsciously, and it had started to go, without warning. I reckon it was all on account of that blarsted Jack working me up. He had a quiet way of working you up to a thing, that made you want to hit ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... observatory, it is easy to go into the labor market and engage a sufficient number of accurate computers, either by time or piece work, or to find an assistant who will make observations with the regularity of clockwork. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various
... Pilot anxiously scans the Barograph, which is an instrument much the same as the Altimeter; but in this case the expansion of the vacuum box causes a pen to trace a line upon a roll of paper. This paper is made by clockwork to pass over the point of the pen, and so a curved line is made which accurately registers the speed of the ascent in feet per minute. No longer is the ascent at the rate of a thousand feet a minute, and the Propeller complains to the Engine, "I'm losing ...
— The Aeroplane Speaks - Fifth Edition • H. Barber
... also brought against the institution. Here life for the inmates is made too easy, and little can be known by them of the actual struggles of the world. The life is machine-like, and all is routine clockwork. By the discipline, which is necessary, much of the spontaneity of growing children is destroyed, and the surroundings are pervaded with the spirit of uniformity, "solidarity" and "dead levelism." On the other hand, the children fail to learn many important lessons in domestic ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best
... I ain't got a quarrel with 'em, the Lord knows. I go to church like clockwork, and pay my pew-rent, too, which is more than some do that gabble the most about salvation. If I pay for the preacher's keep it's only fair that I should get some of the good that comes to him hereafter; that's how it looks to me; so I don't trouble my ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... open," said Saunders, "and try to catch it. If we can't do that, we shall have to wait till the bally clockwork runs down. After all, if it's flesh and blood, it can't ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... the Yamen messengers continue to come and go with clockwork regularity. Yesterday the Chinese Government excelled itself, and made some who have still a sense of humour left laugh cynically. In an original official despatch—that is, not a mere covering despatch—it politely informed the Italian Charge d'Affaires that King Humbert had been assassinated ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... they like. It isn't the piano-tuner. It isn't the man who does the clocks. They know who it is. It isn't that Marriott man. I've found out something about him they don't know. He's got a false stomach. It goes by clockwork. ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... Gautier, who has looked after every detail with the greatest care, and has thus realized a true chef d'oeuvre. The colossal instrument, the total weight of which is 26,400 lb., is maneuvered by hand with the greatest ease. A clockwork movement, due to the same able manufacturer, is capable, besides, of moving the instrument with all the precision desirable, and of permitting it to follow the stars in their travel across the heavens. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 803, May 23, 1891 • Various
... began, "I was put on to Caroline Schimmel; I have found out all about her by this time. She is as regular as clockwork in her duties at least. She wakes at ten and takes her absinthe. Then she goes to a little restaurant she knows, and has her breakfast and a game at cards with any one that will play with her. At six in the evening she goes to the Grand Turk, ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... to make the most of it. But she found it difficult. In the first place her husband was a very busy man. He seemed to be perfectly happy with his cutting people up, and his medical books, and the articles which he wrote about the intricate clockwork inside of us which ticks off the hours from birth to death. Now and then he went out to the theatre with his wife or to dine with friends. But, as a rule, she went alone. She had a limousine, a chauffeur, a low swung touring car—and an electric. ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... soon tearing along the smooth Roman road at a splendid pace, "the ponies going like clockwork," as Vixen remarked approvingly; but poor Miss McCroke thought that any clock which went as fast as those ponies would be deemed the maddest ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... wrote to Bedford, in reply to his letter, "suppose me a troublesome man to deal with, pertinacious about trifles, or standing upon punctilios of authorship. No, Grosvenor, I am a quiet, patient, easy-going hack of the mule breed; regular as clockwork in my pace, sure-footed, bearing the burden which is laid on me, and only obstinate in choosing my own path. If Gifford could see me by this fireside, where, like Nicodemus, one candle suffices me in a large room, he would see a man in a coat 'still more threadbare ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... born, Bradley invented a self-rocking cradle for it. He constructed the motive-power of the machine from some old clockwork which was operated by a huge steel ribbon spring strong enough to move a horse-car and long enough to run for a week without rewinding. When the cradle was completed, he put the baby in it upon a pillow and started the machinery. It worked beautifully, and after ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... for you," Selingman declared, as they followed their porters into the shed. "For me, I am a man of affairs. It is different. My business goes by clockwork. All is regulated by rule, with precision, with punctuality. Now I shall be many hours behind my schedule. I shall be compelled to alter my appointments—I, who pride myself always upon altering nothing. But behold! One must make the ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... There had been bright unclouded skies during the days since his arrival. Only at night had it rained, like clockwork: every night for fifteen minutes immediately after midnight. A light steady shower that ceased as suddenly as it sprang up. It was unusual. This was April in the Spring of 2348 and April was always a month of showery heavens. Had the Mercutians, ...
— Slaves of Mercury • Nat Schachner
... complex; and they do not always stick to truth and bad temper. They are also affected by this queer idolatry of the enormous and elaborate; and cannot help feeling that anything so complicated must go like clockwork. But complexity is no guarantee of accuracy—in clockwork or in anything else. A clock can be as wrong as the human head; and a clock can stop, as ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... in wholesome variety and sufficient number to furnish food for the mental clockwork, —ill-regulated heads, where the faculties are not under the control of the will,—these are the ones that hold the brains which their owners are so apt to tamper with, by introducing the appliances we have been talking about. Now, when a gentleman's brain is empty or ill-regulated, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... uncouthness and extravagance of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans to the amazing brevity, finish and dexterity of Pope. It is good for us to see it too with his eyes. We are apt to see only the beauty and truth that were lost in the process, and the mechanical clockwork that followed upon its completion. These he could not see: but we are in no danger of forgetting them, while we are in danger of forgetting that Pope's achievement gave us the most quotable verse that ever was written, and that his brilliancy and wit quickened the powers of expression ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... business of counting the votes and allotting the preferences was sure to be a slow one at the first time of asking, but there was no hesitation and no confusion. The proceedings in the Wanderer's Hall went forward with the steady certainty of clockwork.... The whole trial was a high one in a town like this with a considerable element of illiterate voters; but taking it all through we have no hesitation in saying that the working of the new system was a ...
— Proportional Representation - A Study in Methods of Election • John H. Humphreys
... look upon his adviser, and moved off, like a piece of Dutch clockwork, to set at liberty his imprisoned angels in this dire emergency. Meanwhile, Sergeant Bothwell began to put the test-oath with such a degree of solemn reverence as might have been expected, being just about the same which is used to this day in ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... of finding asteroids and comets by means of photography is simple and easy. The plate is exposed in a frame that moves by clockwork with the earth, so as to keep the same field of stars steady on the glass. After two, three or four hours' exposure, the photograph will show the fixed stars, but the planets, asteroids and comets will reveal themselves as a white ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... water-soaked package in the open yard of the shops of the Swift Construction Company, proved that there was enough explosive in the bomb to blow the shed itself to pieces. But the stopping of the clockwork attachment of ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Locomotive - or, Two Miles a Minute on the Rails • Victor Appleton
... concerns itself with the grievances of its own particular supporters, while a crowd of sightseers circulates, enjoying the oratory with a desultory impartiality. The usual silhouettes of gesticulating speakers appear like jerky clockwork figures above the throng. A crowd of Socialists are "remembering Chicago" in a corner. The chief centre of attraction is a drag occupied by a Philanthropic Young-lady Chairwoman, her chaperon, some leading laundresses, one or two male sympathisers, and a couple of ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, June 27, 1891 • Various
... in the boat, and clockwork to set the whole thing off at ten o'clock tonight. He didn't come right out and say so, you understand, and I may be making a fool of myself. But if I am—God knows, it won't be the first time ... Anyhow ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... with the structure of an ordinary astronomical observatory. The building is usually cylindrical in shape, with a very light hemispherical roof capable of being turned round from the interior. The telescope is supported upon a stone pillar in the centre, and a clockwork arrangement compensates for the earth's rotation, and allows a star once found to be continuously observed. Besides this, there is a compact tracery of wheels and screws about its point of support, by which the astronomer ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... make him easy, when he was sotting at every alehouse in town. I knew his last wife: she was a woman of breeding, good humour, and complaisance—knew how to live in the world. As for you, you look like a puppet moved by clockwork; your clothes hang upon you as they were upon tenter-hooks; and you come into a room as you were going to steal away a pint pot. Get you gone in the country, to look after your mother's poultry, to milk the cows, churn the butter, and dress up nosegays for a holiday, and not meddle ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... looked as if she was as intelligent as any of them; but the sight was not an agreeable one to men accustomed to discipline. The contrast when the TAMERLANE came along an hour or so after was emphatic. Every man at his post; every order carried out with the precision of clockwork; the captain pacing the quarter-deck as if she were a line-of-battle ship—here the airs put on were almost ludicrous in the other direction. Although she was only "a good jump" long, as we say, whenever an order was given, ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... find,' Scott says, 'was perhaps the right sort of lamp in which to burn this oil. Fortunately an old Arctic explorer, Captain Egerton, presented me with a patent lamp in which the draught is produced by a fan worked by clockwork mechanism, and no chimney is needed. One can imagine the great mortality there would be in chimneys if we were obliged to employ them, so that when, on trial, this lamp was found to give an excellent light, others of the same sort were purchased, and we now use them exclusively in ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... hundred of religious writers. And what wonder should there be in this, when the main qualification for such a style was plain good sense, natural feeling, unpretendingness, some little scholarly practice in putting together the clockwork of sentences, so as to avoid mechanical awkwardness of construction, but above all the advantage of a subject, such in its nature as instinctively to reject ornament, lest it should draw off attention ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... to us, old man," Dick was explaining. "We run the ranch like clockwork, and the servants are wonders; but we allow ourselves all sorts of loosenesses. If you'd arrived two minutes later there'd have been no one to welcome you but the Chinese boys. I was just going for a ride, and Paula—Mrs. ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... seaside for the sake of the children was a subject that could not be approached. All small feminine social arrangements, dependent for their accomplishment on the use of the horses, were mown down like grass. Colonel Bellairs hated what he called "living by clockwork." ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... mysteriously appointed, could be accurately predicted; of the moon that she regularly waxed and waned, drawing the waters of the earth in a flow and ebb, the gauge of which and the time-table could be advertised beforehand in the almanack; of the stars, that they swung as by clockwork around the pole. Says the son ...
— Poetry • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... throne of glistening emeralds and listens to all the troubles of her people, which they are sure to tell her about. Around Ozma's throne, on such occasions, are grouped all the important personages of Oz, such as the Scarecrow, Jack Pumpkinhead, Tiktok the Clockwork Man, the Tin Woodman, the Wizard of Oz, the Shaggy Man and other famous fairy people. Little Dorothy usually has a seat at Ozma's feet, and crouched on either side the throne are two enormous beasts known as the Hungry Tiger and the ...
— Little Wizard Stories of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... proper place, until the whole was like a mosaic of defense. The "bear" pool was met on the threshold; it was permitted to press forward eighth by eighth according to a plan; one Bayard broker having made his purchases, another took his place; it was like clockwork. The whole five hundred and sixty-one thousand shares were bought and sold; and from first to last there came never ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... would come home much more closely to the popular mind of both continents if we called this strip of sea the Straits of New York, and classed our liners, not as the successors of Columbus's caravels, but simply as what they are: giant ferry-boats plying with clockwork punctuality between the twin ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... systematic inversion of the parts, the geometrical development of a farcical misunderstanding, and many other stage contrivances, must derive their comic force from the same source,—the art of the playwright probably consisting in setting before us an obvious clockwork arrangement of human events, while carefully preserving an outward aspect of probability and thereby retaining something of the suppleness of life. But we must not forestall results which will be duly disclosed in the course of ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... the morning became routine, and proceeded like clockwork. Each patient ox voluntarily drew near, and stood, waiting to be yoked with his fellow and chained to his daily task. So well did each know his place by the side of his mate that the driver had only to place one end of the yoke on the neck of the "off" ox, known, for example, as "Bright," ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell
... lecture here to-night I have on a ready-made suit of clothes, for which I paid yesterday five dollars. In that large boiler there is a stove which I have invented. In the oven of the stove is beef and various vegetables, and to heat it is a kerosene lamp with a clockwork attached. A young man or a young woman, or a young married couple go to the market and buy the cheap cuts of beef, and then, according to my instructions, they put it in the stove with the vegetables, light the lamp, set ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... crowds of Moros perambulated the streets in rich and picturesque costumes, varying in design according to the usage of their tribes. Before the departure of the royal visitor the troops were formed up, military evolutions were performed with clockwork precision, and volley after volley was fired in the air. The Sultan declared he could never receive the Governor with such splendour, but he wanted him to promise to return his visit. It was not politic, however, to agree to ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... incessant work, he spent it in fishing. But not always that, for as likely as not, instead of taking a real holiday he would put in the whole afternoon amusing the children and the boys that he knew, by making kites and toys and clockwork ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... She hadn't done a thing. Her own girls went to fashionable schools and attended sub-deb dances by the score until they came out, which they did at eighteen each like clockwork. She couldn't have been expected to see to it for somebody else's girl, too. Her getting the full blast of it was a quite fortuitous affair, and Joy always felt, looking back afterwards on her explosion, that it had been hard on the lady—who ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer
... benches and whatever else was available, and made a hearty meal. In the pauses of conversation there could be heard through the floor overhead a little world of undertones and creaks from the halting clockwork, which never spread further than the tower they were born in, and raised in the more meditative minds a fancy that here lay the ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... the world like the thumbscrew of the medieval torture chamber. They would get new pacemakers and pay them more; they would drive the men on with new machinery—it was said that in the hog-killing rooms the speed at which the hogs moved was determined by clockwork, and that it was increased a little every day. In piecework they would reduce the time, requiring the same work in a shorter time, and paying the same wages; and then, after the workers had accustomed themselves to this new speed, they would reduce the rate of payment to correspond ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... high consideration. Her Grace laid out her friend's bequest in a superb diamond necklace, which she wore in honor of him, and, if report is to be believed, showed her regard in ways much more extraordinary. It is said that a statue of him in ivory, which moved by clockwork, was placed daily at her table, that she had a wax doll made in imitation of him, and that the feet of the doll were regularly blistered and anointed by the doctors, as poor Congreve's feet had been when he suffered from the gout. A monument ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... my lad. He knows just where his orf forefoot ought to be at one o'clock, and his near hind-foot at two. Why, he goes like clockwork. I just winds him up once with a bit o' corn and a drink o' water, starts him, and there's his old legs go tick-tack, tick-tack, and his head swinging like a pendulow. Use 'is secon' natur', and all I've got to do is to tie up the reins to the fore ladder and go to ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... household, not even Mrs. Poyntz's, was more happily managed. The old Abbots' House had merged its original antique gloom in the softer character of pleasing repose. All her servants adored Mrs. Ashleigh; all found it a pleasure to please her; her establishment had the harmony of clockwork; comfort diffused itself round her like quiet sunshine round a sheltered spot. To gaze on her pleasing countenance, to listen to the simple talk that lapsed from her guileless lips, in even, slow, and lulling murmur, was in itself a respite from "eating cares." She was to the mind what the colour ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... searched, and in a dark closet at the top we came upon a most extraordinary contrivance. This was no less than an exact representation of the agent's head and neck in wax. In it was a wonderfully skilful imitation of a human larynx, which, by a cunning mechanism of clockwork, could be made exactly to simulate the breathing and low moaning of a human being. This the man had, of course, utilized with the connivance of his wife and Wickham in order to prove an alibi, and the deception was so complete that only my own irresistible curiosity ...
— A Master of Mysteries • L. T. Meade
... Bailadors were seen engaged in a song and dance. They were about eighteen inches apart, and alternately jumped two feet into the air, alighting always in the same spot. As soon as one bird alighted the other bird jumped up, their time being like clockwork in its regularity, and each "accompanying himself to the tune of 'to-le-do'—'to-le-do'—'to-le-do,' sounding the syllable 'to' as he crouched to spring, 'le' while in the air, and 'do' as he ...
— Little Folks (December 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... into something not itself. Sardou is a hard taskmaster; he chains his slaves. Without nobility or even coherence of conception, without inner life or even a recognisable semblance of exterior life, the piece goes by clockwork; you cannot make the hands go faster or slower, or bring its mid-day into agreement with the sun. A great actress, who is also a great intelligence, is seen accepting it, for its purpose, with contempt, as a thing to exercise her technical skill upon. As a piece of technical skill, ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... exploded spontaneously—were admitted by a clockwork escapement in minute quantities into the cylinders of his engine, and worked the pistons by the expansive force of the gases generated by the explosion. There was no weight but the engine itself and the cylinders containing the liquefied gases. Furnaces, boilers, condensers, ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... can hardly credit it. Nearly a week, and he as punctual and regular as clockwork! I must run over this evening and catch him. Something must be wrong. And yet why has he not been here? Dear me. ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... will go by clockwork," he assured himself. "Neither fast nor slow, but by clockwork." He had an ingenious ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... knowing of it! It's tight enough and stern enough in big things; martial law sharp enough, and obedience to the letter all through the campaigning; but that don't grate on a fellow; if he's worth his salt he's sure to understand that he must move like clockwork in a fight, and that he's to go to hell at double-quick march, and mute as a mouse, if his officers see fit to send him. That's all right, but they don't fidget you here about the little fal-lals; you may stick your pipe in your mouth, you ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... materialism; or that the Prussian character was originally so made—it is certain that the idea of Prussia always evoked a vision of rudeness, of rigidity, of automatism, as if everything within her went by clockwork, from the gesture of her kings to the ...
— The Meaning of the War - Life & Matter in Conflict • Henri Bergson
... don't amount to ANYthing. Here I am, at my time of life, up the first one in the house. I ring the bell for the cook at quarter-past six every morning, and the breakfast is on the table at half-past seven right along, like clockwork, but I never see anybody but you till I go to ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the light, projected on to small mirrors attached to the magnetic needles of three variometers. A ray of light is reflected from the mirrors for several feet on to a slit, past which revolves sensitized photographic paper folded on a drum moving by clockwork. The slightest movements of the suspended needles are greatly magnified, and, when the paper is removed and developed in a dark-room, a series of intricate curves denoting declination, horizontal intensity and vertical force, are exquisitely traced. Every day the magnetician attends ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... have been more noise; then suddenly it seemed to double and treble in intensity. The ground shook; and over the German trenches there hung a choking cloud of fumes which drifted slowly across the front with the wind. As if by clockwork, the men got out of their trenches and walked slowly over No Man's Land behind the creeping barrage towards the reeking caldron. A great long line of men—thousands and thousands of men; but do not think of them as the men of "some of our ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... man reddened. "If you wouldn't mind examining it—" He drew from his pocket a small, delicately contrived bit of clockwork. "This ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... under that apple tree. It was when our old mare Peggy took fright at a tin peddler's wagon just as she was crossing the bridge at the foot of Smith's hill; what ailed the creature I can't tell, for she's as steady as clockwork generally. Dear me! I've ridden her ever since I was so high! But perhaps it was the sun shining on one of the tins hanging outside the wagon, that reflected into her eyes and scared her out of her wits; at any rate, she gave a sudden ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... description, gay with shining coloured globes and wax lights and paper lanterns; laden with mysterious packages in white paper, tied with ribbon of red, white and blue, and with other things about which there was no mystery—clockwork toys, field guns and ambulance wagons, and a big, splendid Red Cross nurse, difficult to consider a mere doll. Never was seen such a laden tree; it's branches groaned under the weight they bore. And beside it, who but Father Christmas, bowing and smiling with his eyes twinkling under ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... we have is a pen drawing a continuous line on a cylinder which revolves once every hour and is worked continuously by clockwork in an exact record of time. It moves in a straight line when there is no disturbance, and it jumps from right to left and back again when there are serious oscillations of the earth. The extent of these movements of the pen ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... Sergeant!" he cried angrily. "Look for yerself.— Didn't yer see, pardners? I was walking up and down like a clockwork himidge.—Sleep at my post? Me sleep at my post? Wish I may die if I do such a thing. It's the old game. Yer allus 'ated me, Sergeant, from the very first, and—Phew! Here! What's the matter? I've caught something, and it's got me in the nut. I'm ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... was dressed he sat down at his desk in his library overlooking the sea, and immersed himself in the studies which were the lodestar of his existence. His hours were mapped out with rigid regularity like those of a school-boy, and his methodical life worked as though by clockwork. He rose at dawn and read without interruption until eight o'clock. He then partook of some light food (he was a strict vegetarian), after which he walked in the garden of his house, overlooking the Bay of Naples, until ten. ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... the guessing, Monig. All right, maybe it's got a clockwork fuse that didn't break with the impact. Or a gyroscopic fuse. Stick a stethoscope on it and see if you pick up a ticking or anything that ...
— One-Shot • James Benjamin Blish
... reflects that it is the product of human ingenuity, strikes hopeless awe into one. These dismal creations look still uglier at sea than in port, and with an added touch of the ridiculous. Their rolling waddle when seen at a certain angle, their abrupt clockwork nodding in a sea-way, so unlike the soaring lift and swing of a craft under sail, have in them something caricatural, a suggestion of a low parody directed at noble predecessors by an improved generation of dull, mechanical toilers, conceited and ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... Sawhorse, and the people cheered him almost as loudly as they did their lovely Ruler. Behind him stalked with regular, jerky steps, the famous machine-man called Tik-tok, who had been wound up by Dorothy for the occasion. Tik-tok moved by clockwork, and was made all of burnished copper. He really belonged to the Kansas girl, who had much respect for his thoughts after they had been properly wound and set going; but as the copper man would be useless in any place but ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... between two piles of cushions, motionless, so that you could see her from a distance right in the background, looking like an idol, beneath the great fan which her negro waved regularly like a piece of clockwork. These foreign women ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... armature holds a series of parts, S, A, L, which have the effect of stopping the pendulum of a clock placed upon the same apparatus. At the moment, then, that the armature is attracted the pendulum is set free and the clockwork is started. As the current, at the same time, sets a bell ringing, the observer comes and arranges the apparatus again to await a new shock. Knowing the hour at which the hand of the clock was stopped, he sees how long it has been in motion ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various |
